Anything Anything
Last weekend during my day of cooking I broke out the vinyl again and listened to Dramarama Cinéma Vérité which I listened to once last year and still think sounds great.

The album includes a hit called "Anything Anything (I'll Give You)" which at least three different times in my life was discovered by a radio station I listened to frequently and played to death and then some. I loved the song the first time I heard it and I love it still but I can recall the feeling of "enough enough (already)" if I hear it more than once in one day.

[Huge aside: Bob has got me hooked on The Tube a music TV station that plays actual music videos and a huge mix of fun stuff including Led Zepplin and lots of the 80's dawn-of-an-era stuff like Duran Duran and INXS. The other night I saw a U2 video where Bono is sporting the mother of all mullets. I've found myself glued to the The Tube a couple of times with that old, "just one more to see who's next" and the only thing to save me from being there still would be Phil Collins or a simliar horror such that I fled the TV. More than once I've complained about too much Billy Idol but last night they had a video of his ballady song called Sweet Sixteen, which I had completely forgot about and sounded fabulous.]

Back to Dramarama: when I graduated from college and lived in L.A. I wrote live show reviews for a free music newspaper. I could swear I've written about that before but my feverish searching hasn't come up with a previous post. I'll have to dig up some of my reviews.

Before I wrote for the newspaper I wrote reviews for myself in a notebook because it was my dream to be a writer for a music magazine or something in the music business and this was how I prepared.

I saw Dramarama headline a show at the Country Club in Reseda. The date says March 6, 1981 which can't possibly be right since (a) according to Wikipedia the band didn't form until 1982 (although I always was ahead of the curve … ha!) and (b) I was in high school in 1981 and was probably not even allowed to drive to The Valley to see a show.

The date we're going with is March 6, 1987. The show featured one of my favorite local bands at the time Love/Hate which is a topic for another post. I remember nothing about third band on the bill: MIA.

Much as I loved the music, I was not impressed with the band as illustrated by my unfinished review.

It seems to be a rule of blogging that you always need about 20 more minutes than you have on any given post. My allotted time is up. But here's my masterpiece, typed up from the orginal, carefully printed in pencil on white notebook paper:


DRAMARAMA, MIA, LOVE/HATE
MARCH 6, 1987

It's not that Dramarama isn't a cool band. They sport some pretty sharp compositions, and perform clean and tight pumping and grinding motion-thrills stuff. They looked pretty cool onstage, 6 guys and 5 TV screens showing clips and an obtuse selection of random-yet-not-random clips of this and that. And the audience got to hear all the best tunes from their New Rose release - so what was the problem?

Call it a petty witch hunt or what have you but there is something just slightly offensive about watching a swaggering, preening lead singer looking not unlike some USC frat boy strutting arrogantly around stage hiding behind his Ray-Bans and cigarettes and under the pretense of audience participation passes out cookies to the clamoring KROQ teenyboppers. The show was great so what with the attitude?

MIA suffered if only from a lackluster response from the Drama-Audience.